Recent technological advances have led to video transmission becoming a more prevalently utilized form of communication. For instance, video data can be captured, encoded, and transferred over a transmission channel. Further, the video data can be received via the transmission channel, decoded, and outputted (e.g., rendered, displayed, . . . ). Various video compression techniques can be used to reduce the quantity of data utilized to represent video images; thus, compressed video can reduce bandwidth used for transfer of digital video over the transmission channel. Interframe compression, for example, is a type of video compression that can use one or more earlier or later frames in a sequence of frames to compress a current frame.
Oftentimes when video is transferred via a transmission channel, errors can occur. For instance, each frame in a transmitted sequence of video frames can be sent in one or more packets; thus, loss of a packet during transfer can result in loss of a frame. Error Resilience (ER) and Error Concealment (EC) techniques are oftentimes employed with video transmission today due to the use of predictive coding and Variable Length Coding (VLC) in video compression. For instance, conventional interframe compression techniques can yield I-frames and P-frames. Each P-frame is predicted from its immediate previous frame. Although the compression efficiency of this approach is high, it is vulnerable to errors in the transmission channel. If one frame is lost or corrupted during transmission, the error in the reconstructed frame at the decoder will propagate to the remaining frames until the next I-frame is received.
Several ER methods have been developed for video communication, such as Forward Error Correction (FEC), Layered Coding, and Multiple Description Coding (MDC). Different from the traditional Single Description Coding (SDC), MDC divides the video stream into equally important streams (descriptions), which are sent to the destination through different channels. Error may occur in the channels. Suppose the failure probability of each channel is independently and identically distributed with probability p. When using conventional SDC, the entire description will be lost with probability p; if M descriptions are used and sent on M different channels, the probability of losing the entire description is pM, which is much less than p. An example implementation of MDC is an odd/even temporal sub-sampling approach, where an even frame in a frame sequence is predicted from the previous even frame and an odd frame in the frame sequence is predicted from the previous odd frame. Since the reference frames are farther in time, the prediction of such approach may not be as good as the conventional codec and the compression efficiency is lower. On the other hand, since each stream is encoded and transmitted separately, the corruption of one stream will not affect the other. As a result, the decoder can simply display the correct video stream at half the original frame rate, or reconstruct the corrupted frame by some appropriate EC technique (e.g., Temporal Interpolation, . . . ).
In conventional EC algorithms, the corrupted (e.g., lost, . . . ) frames are error-concealed. Further, the following frames are typically decoded as usual. Since error concealment can fail for the lost frame under various scenarios (e.g., new objects appearing, old objects disappearing, . . . ), a large initial error can be generated that can be propagated to following frames. However, conventional EC techniques typically fail to account for such error propagation to frames following a corrupted frame.